Behaviour that Martin reports is expected. There are many ways that Sugar fails to start if any of the dependencies are missing.
The strace contains the traceback, but it is not as easy as reading the traceback in ~/.sugar/default/logs/shell.log so please post that next time you have a problem starting Sugar. All I can see is that it was in homewindow.py -> meshbox.py -> neighborhood.py, which suggests Telepathy Salut is missing, and that correlates with Martin's "Versions of packages sugar-session recommends" list. As sugar-session contains tools that don't need Telepathy Salut to be installed, I'm fine with the dependency remaining as Recommends. On IRC Martin mentioned installing sugar-session package; my usual recommendation is to install the sucrose package, and that's what is maintained on the Sugar Wiki; http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Debian -- James Cameron http://quozl.netrek.org/
